Posts filed under 'Week 7 - Morrison'
Somewhat random, especially since I don’t even like baseball all that much, but I saw this op/ed article as I was skimming the daily headlines, and once I started reading it, couldn’t help but think how perfectly it related to our class. Especially this line:
“You can’t record this event without noting its instant ‘tabloidization’ in countless minds. Perhaps, in retrospect, we’ll remember Lidle’s death as, among other things, a landmark in our progressive desensitization or our inability to distinguish between celebrity news and real life.”
Here’s the link to the article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/11/AR2006101102003.html
October 12th, 2006
The Bluest Eye and Bright Eyes both position little girls as mother to be. Although still children, their play with dolls is a glimpse of the adult roles they will or are expected to inhabit. Both texts assume that all little girls want blue-eyed dolls and know what to do with it – care for and cherish it. The little black children in BE aren’t given a voice to say what they wish for since they are generally ignored and invisible (something that Shirley isn’t), it is assumed that they all desire the same thing – to be own and care for, to be mother, to a blue eyed doll. Possession of the doll as a commodity symbolizes more than just capitalist commodity relations; it also symbolizes race and gender relations. That Claudia and Frieda are given blue eye dolls is also a statement of their mother’s desire to possess for themselves, what these dolls symbolize. Even though Shirley herself is coded as in need of ‘rescue’ after her mother’s death, she can still rescue Joy’s doll from her cruel treatment and through her efforts; Joy in this and many instances has to be shown how to be a good mother to her doll.
Mothering is coded in different ways in the BE and in Bright Eyes. Adults fight over Shirley Temple in Bright Eyes - she is the cute blue-eyed child deserving of love. As much as they can, the adults shield her from feeling pain – because pain is not in associated with her image. Shirley is so disconnected from pain and suffering that she isn’t shown mourning her mother’s death for any prolonged period, and her mother’s death is the only instance of her being sad in the movie. She is able to bounce quickly back from this sadness and be in her typical song, dance and smile persona. A similar image of the white child exists in BE. Pauline description of and interaction with “the little Fisher girl” suggests caring, nurturing, cuddling, softness and loving – all feelings she is unable to express with her own family and especially her daughter. She doesn’t see her daughter Pecola as deserving of these affections because she’s ugly. When she is faced with a situation in which she can mother both black and white children she demonstrates a clear contrast in how they are to be mothered. In contrast, black mothering of black children is seen in whippings, beatings, physical pain and violence. Morrison illustrates that black mothers know how and can demonstrate mothering as affirmation, love and affection, yet the disconnect remains between their mothering techniques of own black children and white and brown children.
Even the inanimate blue-eyed dolls aren’t seen as deserving of physical pain and mal treatment, yet black children are. Claudia’s destruction and dismemberment of her doll is met with adult derision and mourning. It makes me wonder if their play with dolls can be looked at as “ideal servant” (BE 127) training. Black children’s play with blue-eyed dolls can be seen as a mirror for how to differentiate between themselves as incomplete and the white body as the ideal whole. Desire, wish fulfillment, mothering come together in Morrison’s description of the ideal servant. As the ideal servant, Pauline is finally able to possess beauty, even if indirectly, in her encounters with the Fisher household. She uses a language of ownership that makes her an extension of the household; “it was a pleasure to stand in her kitchen…and reveling in her shiny pots and pans and polished floors” (128) [my emphasis added] and which at the same time distances her from her own black household and economic and social existence. Morrison’s description of the image of the ideal servant is part of the larger issue that she addresses in BE: the deserving black body. The characters (Claudia may be the only exception) all seem to associate beauty with treatment, and code blue eyes as deserving of good, and black skin as deserving of bad. Morrison’s soil metaphor at the beginning and end of the novel indicate that victim blaming, even self-blaming, is an often-heard response to racial injustice and prejudice. She notes, “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby (5)…when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim has no right to live. We are wrong, of course (206). Morrison therefore challenges her readers to see the self-hate she describes as a part of larger systemic relations.
October 11th, 2006
I grew up with Barbies. Not only grew up, but I collected them. It was a family tradition - my grandmother collected Barbies, so I too collected them. Growing up I loved Barbie and I remember vividly in my freshman year of college, in my first woman’s studies course, learning the negative effects that Barbie leaves on the psyche of little girls. I was mortified (maybe a slight exaggeration) this week I had a similar experience with Shirley Temple. Thanks to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eyes, I was confronted once again with an image of my childhood, which I loved, and forced to recognize the destructive nature of white dominance.
Whether we think her prose is effective or not, she brings to the forefront the damaging effects of beauty solely depicted in the form of blue eyes and blonde hair. Watching Bright Eyes, I was struck by one of the things that Loop says to Shirley, “It’s not enough to be pretty there [pointing to her face], but you need to be pretty here [pointing to her heart].” But that message doesn’t translate, according to Morrison, because ultimately we are a visual society and the loved one is always the one with blue eyes and blond curls.
Jakester in his blog said, “Like I said, I wanted to be poor, just so I could aspire to the hopes that Shirley offered. No wonder Pauline wanted them so badly. They were attainable, if only you could share it with the gorgeous blue-eyed little girl.” But that’s just it… for Pauline, for Pecola, for the other characters in Morrison’s novel, these hopes that Shirly offers are NEVER attainable. They are constantly striving for something that is forever out of their reach. The whole system is set up so that they fail - so that they never attain what they desire. The character of Claudia seems aware of this in her repulsion against the white baby dolls and against Shirley Temple. She seems the only one to recognize the danger in loving the white ideal, yet Morrison show how this recognition must be translated into love of the Shirley Temple version of beauty: “The best hiding place [for shame] was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love. It was a small step to Shirley Temple. I learned much later to worship her, just as I learned to delight in cleanliness, knowing, even as I learned, that change was adjustment without improvement” (Morrison 23). Here Morrison seems to be saying that adapting the white ideal of beauty is inevitable. However, she then proceeds to show that if this white ideal of beauty is taken on, it completely destroys the psyche of a young black girl. This isn’t something that just happened during the depression or the years that followed. We still have “flesh colored” band-aids, which are white. We have “flesh colored” pantyhose, which are white. These two examples are continuing forms of dominant whiteness, tied in with the ideal beauty found in our blond haired, blue eyed dolls and icons. Morrison urges the reader to recognize their complicitness in “the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (Morrison 190).
A few comments/questions still remain for me regarding Morrison’s text that I would love us to discuss in class. 1. The Bluest Eyes - the title itself can be read as the color blue or blue meaning sad. So Morrison gives us the desiring for the eyes that are the bluest in color, representing the saddest eyes of all. 2. To play devil’s advocate, are we (and Morrison) putting too much blame on the influence of media on the break down of Pecola? Couldn’t one argue, shouldn’t one argue that the multiple rapes of this delicate girl by her own father might in fact lead to such a mental break? Couldn’t the other traumatic events in Pecola’s life, such as being beaten by her mother and boys at school, killing/watching an old dog die, having her father set their house on fire, result in her destruction? Are all of these atrocities to be attributed to society’s definition of beauty as the lovely white child?
October 11th, 2006
After reading “The Bluest Eye” and the Eckert essay, I almost want to be poor just because of all the attention they receive, favorable or not. I wonder what it must have felt like in the depression era to know that most of what the government was doing was aimed at me. Almost every program was targeted at the poor and soon-to-be-poor middle-class. They felt the brunt of the Depression and, as we saw in some of the photographs from last week, felt the long term effects worse than anyone else. In Morrison’s novel, the poor is the centerpiece. It is what makes each character what they are, the basis for their being. It almost seems as if Pecola and Pauline could not exist in higher society. Pauline can only dream of it and experience it through the films, while Pecola seems to seep the experience through her drinking cup. Yet Morrison, in her own way makes that beautiful. To answer Joe’s question, her prose is meant to not only implicate but intimately involve the reader. It is intentional and, while the class seems divided on whether or not it works, I think it gives credence to her talent that it even evokes that kind of argument in the many styles that she adopts in her other books as well.The same could be said for Shirley Temple. While I cannot attribute a deliberate attempt on her part to involve the viewer (and who could hate that face anyway?) the involvement of the crew to the point of quasi-hypnotism at least means that she was in some way vying for attention. Like I said, I wanted to be poor, just so I could aspire to the hopes that Shirley offered. No wonder Pauline wanted them so badly. They were attainable, if only you could share it with the gorgeous blue-eyed little girl. Fox’s part in this is definitely a bit more insidious. The use of Shirley (can I call her Shirley?) meant that they recognized the potential and used it to prey on that very deep and personal bond that Shirley could inspire. If this is the case, what does this mean when we look at Morrison’s use of the poor to further her novel? Many have said that she used such audacious material as a means of selling more books, and the controversy of her books being banned from certain libraries and book stores only seemed to further the sales.
What does it mean to prey on the poor to further one’s own cause, or to contain them in a spectacle as a means of making money? Can it be said that this is what Morrison was doing, or was she exposing this as Eckert was doing in her essay?
October 11th, 2006
To continue the thread on “blaming” starting with Hemal’s and followed by Prof. Sample’s and Marique’s responses, I want to share some of my thoughts regarding text and readership.
(Please be advised that I’m still in the aftermath of reading Morrison and The Bluest Eye for the very first time. It was also written before Tim and Rachel posted theirs so some of the points may have been brought up by them also.)
I’m wondering what Hemal and Prof. Sample meant precisely when you mentioned “not feeling comfortable.” Personally, I much prefer a sophisticated “uncomfort” level than the easy, enjoyable experience of say, watching most teen movies (or am I risking H&A’s elitism?). Even so, the swell of complex emotions that The Bluest Eye aroused in me is quite puzzling.
I am neither black nor white, nor am I an American. “Logically” I should perhaps have the least stake in being “implicated” by the subject matter of this novel. Yet Morrison has successfully “interpellated” me, in Althusser’s sense of the term. As a reader that is subjected to the writer’s narrative structure, I can hardly contain an outsider subject position, determined by my race, citizenship, and personal growth– I am at once inside and outside, “called upon,” as it were, to examine the historical, social, and cultural conditions that have created the multi-layered tragedies in the lives of the characters, while letting my feelings of empathy flow uncontrollably. (But I’ve also questioned: would I have felt the same toward the novel if I hadn’t been given the information on Morrison’s status in American and world literature?)
As I struggled, in writing this post, to pull myself out of this interpellation and speak objectively, I somehow experienced a feeling of “lost,” as if being “inside” that smashed world of Pecola’s is not as bad as having to stand “outside” of it to analyze our own. To be sure, it is a much more daunting task to face the harsh realities that remain in our material and psychic life than to lament upon the fictive happenings in the imagined field of a cultural product. I suspect part of the “uncomfortability” derives from this difficulty.
Marique’s comment on a possible road to redemption, that is, changing the world in our small individual ways, echoes that of my own. In fact, a thoughtful interrogation into the cultural production and consumption of The Bluest Eye seems qualified as an endeavor on that account. However, as Hemal and Prof. Sample pointed out, a single cultural artifact, especially one as richly embedded as this novel, necessarily solicits multiple understandings from different reading positions. The “feminized,” if not romanticized depiction of the father-child rape, for one, runs the risk of turning the act into a spectacle at the expense of genuine criticality toward its traumatic consequences. Although Morrison’s innovative (to me, at least) storytelling does point to a more nuanced reflection on the incest taboos in presumably Western/civilized sexual life, I couldn’t help but fear that such a “softened” angle could work to perpetuate rather than exterminate the brutality toward those victims who may themselves be unconscious of their own pains. (The other example is Soaphead Church’s self-condoning note on child molestation.)
As I am wrapping up, I feel like I’ve gone a bit further than I thought I would, in becoming (overly) objective of this product of representation. I do miss the moments when tears came to my eyes for no reason, such as the time when I “heard” the laughter of Claudia’s mother upon finding out Pecola’s first menstruation and washing her in a bath tub, after insinuatingly blaming her endlessly for drinking too much milk from that Shirley Temple container.
October 10th, 2006
I will break Morrison’s “discussion” of spectacle into two forms in this novel: 1) as the mass consumer spectacle (silver screen and Shirley mug), and 2) as what I will call “interpersonal spectacle” (characters watching other characters through the bushes, etc.). The Autumn section begins, “Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men and sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel” (9). The narrator starts us off by observing other people (of course, this sentence also sets a mood). The neighbors all watch each other from across the playground, across the schoolyard, from the bushes by the house, through the tall grass in a field. When a person is not within sight the characters still talk about that person; they talk about the despicable things that other people do and live through. I think this constant observing of others as spectacles makes the characters ready to absorb the mass consumer spectacle, both because of the habit of observing and because of their need to observe/experience anything that is not so obviously negative (poverty, rape). Morrison most obviously shows this need to observe something positive through Pauline and Pecola. Also, through Cholly’s observation of his daughter, which is based on an older, almost voyeuristic observation of the younger version of his wife.
I just realized my point: the Breedloves are the characters most consumed by the spectacle, as observers and as observed, which results in their ultimate doom. The other characters are “merely” unfortunate (when compared to the Breedloves) due to the social conditions they have inherited. If Morrison is making an assertion regarding spectacle, it is that to participate in spectacle a little bit (enjoy the mug a little, watch only one movie) is acceptable, but to voraciously consume spectacle (adore the mug, live in the movie, replace your wife’s image with your daughter’s) will consume you and make you unnatural.
Morrison’s use of different narrative perspectives adds depth to my experience of the interpersonal spectacle (defined in the first paragraph) in this novel. In my initial observance of Pauline and Cholly (through a non-omniscient outside narrator) I did not see any excuse for their abuse of each other; I did not feel any warmth towards them. Later in the novel the narrator introduces me to these characters before they were so crude. Though I do not forgive their actions, I can see them more as people and less as automatons carrying on a legacy of abuse. Morrison, in a way, has shone limits of spectacle by revealing that what is observed has more depth and meaning than the readily available information conveys.
As previous blog entries have mentioned, Morrison sets the reader up to be an observer in the world of the novel. The role of Shirley Temple’s mother is left open so the movie goers can fill the role (Merish 197). The name (role) of the narrator in The Bluest Eye is left open so the reader may fill the role. My experience of “filling” the role of narrator does not provide me more knowledge but gives me a sense that I lived the story; I have participated. – Tim
October 10th, 2006
I agree with Hemal, who does not “buy” Morrison’s assigning of motive or reason to Cholly’s raping of Pecola “one bit”. I can’t say that I do either. Her decision to write Cholly’s experience of it as some drunken, fuzzy memory tied to his early affection to his wife is disturbing to say the least. What are her intentions in including the nostalgic, leg-biting details?
“Having no idea of how to raise children and having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a relationship would be” (160). This is just after Morrison tells us about how he laments the exit of curiosity and desire he used to feel for life and his wife. So, we are told, he is…bored. She then points out that despite the fact that he had someone to care for him, that her “age, sex and interests were so remote from his own” that “he never felt a stable connection between himself and his children.” WHA? Was my first reaction. But as I read through the book again, I think that Hemal is onto something with her questions about blame, even though I would normally dismiss the idea as a chicken and egg question that was non-productive.
Now I’m thinking that Morrison is indeed being sly. In the Blame Trials, she plays the witness, judge, jury, plaintiff, defendant and reader, daring us or implicating us in any or all of these roles, depending on our reactions to each voice. Perhaps in her defense or rationalization or whatever you want to call it of Cholly she is pointing out how easy it is to slip into the narrow role of blame-assigner, or laymen’s psychologist, or subscribing to the victim-of-circumstance theory. Or maybe Morrison is simply expressing her own confusion and anger, saying there are no answers or sufficient explanations that will hold. That history and events are not linear, but constellation-like, as er- I forgot who, Cadava? Benjamin?- said, and depend on who is trying to piece together what kind of picture.
Or maybe Claudia is her answer to the actions of Cholly, Pauline, those who condemn Pecola, Soaphead, etc. Maybe she is what Morrison wishes to hold up as “exhibit A, not a victim of circumstance”. A young girl who felt unheard by adults, including her mother (“adults do not talk to us, they give us directions” “when we catch colds, they shake their heads at our lack of consideration”(10), who clearly felt the alienation and rejection of being black (Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals, etc.), but who saw this and rebelled, maintaining a sense of self-worth and a constant feeling that her situation (and others’) was unjust. I found it, honestly, hard to believe at times. A child’s anger at white children and baby dolls is easy to understand, and even her sympathy for Pecola as an underdog, but the sense of moral responsibility that she and Freida feel for Pecola’s baby and her nuanced understanding of its significance as something they needed to love “just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Peals” paint quite a far-reaching view for an 11-year-old to have (191), so I have to see them as a larger point Morrison is trying to express.
For Cholly, Pecola and Pauline, at times, the dominant culture’s gaze is no different from their own. “What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven year old daughter?” (161).
“A little girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” Here, I feel like Morrison is screaming at the reader in anger. The whole text seems laden with these cathartic, accusational, charged moments.
Just one more thought: to what extent are Morrison’s characters like West’s? I saw this as a very different sort of novel, but maybe it isn’t. Cholly, Pauline, Claudia’s mother and her peers, Geraldine’s of the world, etc. Joe.Hubris- I agree with you about her reductive eye- is she creating the same caricatures of stereotypes that West is of Hollywood types? What parts could be sardonically, angrily satirical in this way? Geraldine and Soaphead are both rendered and explained in one chapter each, quickly, and authoritatively. Is Pecola Morrison’s sardonically spectacular freak, her answer to what the spectacular freakery of Shirley Temple means? I don’t know.
October 10th, 2006
I read Professor Sample’s response to Hemal’s post after last week’s class before really getting to the meat of Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” so I tried to look at her text singularly and her statements and judgements of society and spectacle separate from the other authors we’ve read so far this semester. That was, in a word, TOUGH. After burying yourself in a certain philosophy or culture criticism and trying to apply theories to texts, it’s difficult to try to read something plainly, unbiased.
Anyway, I want to respond to a few of the points Hemal made in her post, most particularly the questions about blame and reader responsibility. First: blame. I think trying to establish blame in a novel such as this is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or perhaps this question is more apt: are we products of our environment or do we produce our environment? (Does that make sense?) I mean, is Pecola a product of a racist, sexist, abusive society, or does she contribute, in her own small way, to society’s racist and sexist views by idolizing Shirley Temple and desperately wanting blue eyes and desperately wanting to be anything but who she is and what she looks like? Who’s to blame for Pauline’s erosion: Hollywood, for producing the movies she sees and the actresses she wishes to emulate, or Pauline, for paying money to see them, thus fueling the production of more movies idolizing Hollywood’s idea of blond, blue-eyed beauty?
Given this, and keeping in mind the whole “which comes first” idea, I wonder how much “blame” we can really place on these characters. I mean, hatred, crime, abuse, ignorance and racism are all cyclical in generation–hate feeds hate, the abused often abuse, the racist often promote racism to their children, and so on. Junior carries on Geraldine’s coldness and hatred when he torments Pecola with the cat, Sammy and Pecola absorb Pauline’s unhappiness and bitterness, Maureen Peal repeats the words of white America, “I am cute! And you ugly!”, to Pecola, Frieda and Claudia. No, I’m not condoning any of the characters’ behavior, but I am saying that it’s hardly surprising to see these beaten down, self-loathing and poorly educated characters turn on those close to them and abuse, hurt, rape and ignore, adding energy to a cultural cycle of oppression, hatred and dissastifaction.
Hemal asks, “And where do the readers stand in this novel? Those of us who are forced to share the gaze and are thereby implicated in Pecola’s fate?” In last week’s blog, I talked about Benjamin’s idea of the storyteller, how the solitary individual can no longer express himself “by giving examples of his most important concerns, [because he] is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others” (p. 87).
However, I think Morrison is playing storyteller here - giving examples of her most important concerns and, in a way, counseling us. She’s counseling us to be aware. She’s directing a harsh spotlight on sensitive, important cultural issues. She’s warning her readers that we all–even small, poor, black children such as Frieda and Claudia–have the power to oppress and humiliate and beat others down to raise ourselves up (”We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasty of our strength.” p. 205). And she’s saying that, if we are not careful, if we do not make some small effort to break the cycle, it (i.e. our culture) will remain just that–a cycle of (to borrow a few of Morrison’s “Afterword” comments) dismissal, trivialization and abuse.
As readers, yes, we are “forced” to share the gaze, but I think we are only implicated in the fates of characters/others if we do nothing with what we see.
October 10th, 2006
I think it is a very real possibility that we are implicated in the “blame” of Morrison’s novel, if we were to call it such. At least to the extent that we are made uncomfortable by the realization of our own participation in the culture of destruction (as far as the young girls in Bluest Eye are concerned)–after all, even after reading such loaded articles, I can’t help but be charmed by some of Shirley Temple’s movie antics. Not that Morrison goes so far as to blame the reader for participating in it, just as her characters do. It’s just a knowledge of implication and of our own well-being (whether white or black) that is important to keep in mind before becoming fully engrossed in such spectacles. Maybe? I think this applies equally to characters like Geraldine who have somehow “succeeded” in at least not being ugly in the ways that are feared in this novel, and yet this existence, even if it wasn’t broken and incomplete (seeing as she is confronted and threatened by Pecola’s presence), would still be a failure. And she is one of the characters I feel very sorry for. I don’t know that I’m quite touching on what I want to say though, there is certainly a lot more to this (and everything) in the novel. And let me just say, while I enjoy Morrison, having to read this particular novel more than once within a couple of years is rather depressing. And her books always spiral so fast emotionally towards the end that it often becomes a little much (and sometimes feels a little over written). But I digress!
I found the Eckert article to be more interesting/useful than Merish. Perhaps reading the Eckert first gave most of the information/insight needed to understand the implications of Shirley in Morrison’s novel. I also thought his use of the “fabled” Shirley quotes more in depth. Merish, however, touched on a very curious piece of information–the conscious use of the child in advertising to transfer maternal affection from child to commodity. This was a slightly new way of seeing the commodity that I had not thought of before. I mean, it’s a pretty straightforward point, it was just new and interesting to me. I thought I understood the attempts of certain advertising to seduce the “maternal instinct” through the presence of a child, but I had never made the connection of an actual “transfer” of affection. This has some dubious implications for the consciousness of consumer and commodity within the system that produces the commodity, a little earlier than our modern assumptions that advertising is always out to “get” us. A rather intellectual-sounding consciousness at that.
One final moment of discomfort—how does everyone think that Cholly’s (repeated) rape of Pecola fits into the structure of the novel? We’ve discussed the Shirley consumer culture a bit now, and moments of hatred and self-hatred and self-love, so what does this event mean for Morrison or the reader? Other than a tool of transformation for Pecola into a certain madness? What has Cholly succeeded at? Failed at? This is part of the “overwhelming” nature that often characterizes the (near) conclusions of Morrison’s novels (at least to me). But I find myself questioning what has happened to Cholly, what is his character-conclusion, and dare I say, is he left as horrible as the rape leaves Pecola? I think Morrison has conscious concerns not only with race, but gender as well, and the ways in which the two interlace and interrogate each other, so focusing on a male character and his outcome might bring about some profitable discussion. Also, what are some of our conventional ways of perceiving rape, and the psychology of aggressor and victim, and how are these challenged by the novel? To what extent do we read the rape in terms of the “bigger theoretical picture,” and to what extent, a bare-faced, violent rape? Does this go back to our implications as readers? Are we intended (and this is a stretch) to be somewhat ashamed of our own literary analyses of the scene, even as they are necessary for understanding the novel?
Now, not to just drop out here, but at least for now, I think I’ve written enough!
October 10th, 2006
In the author afterward, which I’m shamelessly pulling from, Morrison writes that in The Bluest Eye,
The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self-mocking, humorous critique of cultural/racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze. (210)
It is the damaging effects of this “outside gaze” that ultimately destroys Pecola. The particularly destructive and cumulative effect of the gaze, in the form of the popular spectacle, cruelly combines to lead her to the fate that she suffers.
It’s what Claudine called the ‘universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples and Maureen Pearls” (190) that are partly if not wholly responsible for what ends up happening to Pecola. The gaze of the outside world, causes such a deep internalization of racist thought that even Pecola’s community shuns her.
The “gaze” is most shockingly and sickeningly illustrated in the graphic scene where Cholly, as a boy, has sex for the first time with Darlene when white men come upon them and watch. Their gaze destroys Cholly and makes him hate not only himself but the girl also. He cannot hate the white men, he thinks, because that is unthinkable to his young mind and it will consume him. (151). While I see what Morrison is doing in trying to assign motive and some sort of reason behind Cholly’s final actions, I do not buy it one bit.
Morrison’s most damaging critique of consumer culture, I feel, comes through in the form of Pauline Breedlove and her matinee picture shows. She writes that it is here that Pauline is introduced to the ideas of romantic love and physical beauty, “probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought” (122). From this well spring of consumer culture, Morrison seems to be saying, springs the “meanness” that takes over her life and makes her cold indifferent to her own daughter.
Pauline uses the films to fill the empty void of her life. The Hollywood spectacle educates her to want things she cannot have and awakens her to artificial material desire. In this same way, Pecola fetishsizes the Shirley Temple cup, drinking from it every chance she can, and attaching a magical quality to the blue eyes of the actress.
While I agree somewhat with Morrisons’ point about the destructive results of pure fantasy, does Pauline have no right to expect romance and beauty from her life? Is she supposed to settle for a drunken, pedophile of a husband? Where is the real misery in Pauline’s life cultivated? Is it due to the consumer culture that shoves its ideas of beauty, wealth and happiness into the faces of those that cannot attain them? Or is it due the more ingrained problems that stem from years of exploitation?
Perhaps, like Adorno and Horkheimer warned us, the spectacle of Hollywood can only distract us for so long, making us blind to the real social ills which plague our society.
Basically, I have the same question here that I had with West’s Day of the Locusts. I want to know (and perhaps this is a simplistic question to ask) whose fault is this? Morrison points out numerous endemic failures of the system that precipitate this chain of unfathomable events, including poverty and lack of education, yet at the core of all this is the “casual racial contempt” (210) and “racial self-contempt” (210) through which the African-American community views themselves and Pecola. Is it a dialectic situation, hate tha feeds on hate? And where are do the readers stand in this novel? Those of us who are forced to share the gaze and are thereby implicated in Pecola’s fate?
I started off last week’s post commenting on how uncomfortable a read West’s Day of The Locusts was. If only I’d known what we were getting into this week.
October 10th, 2006
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